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8 thoughts on “Blogging Daze”

I’m relieved to read the post-script!
I like the italicized ‘Real’ though I’m often puzzled when that label is placed on things, oh this is ‘real’ music, not just, not real music?
There’s a saying in music, all you need are three chords and the truth.
It could probably be modified here, all you need are a few stanzas and the truth – and I call that ‘real’ writing ofopinions!

Ha ha, thank you so much, Geoff! I believe your name is Geoff, and please call me Amrita! Here’s my brutally honest assessment of who is a real writer – someone who has managed to publish a book, even a bad one, as a jumping off point to be considered a real writer when they go and do their ‘other’ writing which may or may not be in long form. I’ve met too many people who think ‘blog’ and ‘blogger’ are dirty words, not worthy of any literary merit. So, to me, being a real writer would be just getting ‘a’ book off my chest, so that I can go and write whatever I want, and whatever I get the opportunity to write, after that.

I was just thinking about ‘real’ music today! To me, a good song is a good song is a good song. A book shouldn’t have to be ‘light’ or ‘serious’, it has to be readable. There is a need and basis for questioning ‘authenticity’ in any art, but the definition of authenticity tends to be limited. For example, the Oscars’ very limited view of what makes good cinema in any given year.
And I do like that quote about music! I believe something similar was said of punk, right? I think they gave diagrams of A, D, and E and said “go start a band”. It was modified for synthpop. The quote was, “This is a finger, this another…now write a song.” Ah, if only that was enough to write a song like Synth Master Nick Rhodes!

Laughed at that synth quote – I remember thinking it was impressive that the keyboardist in flock of seagulls was managing to play the song using only 2 fingers (from 0:43-0:47 in the YouTube video)!
Interesting ideas of what qualifies as real in writing – for those blog haters, how many ‘books’ in sports/music/pop culture are really just a collection of essays that originated on, what’s that dirty word again, a blog? 🙂

I once wrote a post on this called “Of Why People Don’t Read Blogs”. Here’s the link if you are interested: https://ofopinions.wordpress.com/2014/09/30/why-people-dont-read-blogs/
Basically, snobbery towards blogs is inevitable, because there will always be certain people criticizing a popular form. I read an article on The Goldfinch which discussed whether it is a ‘serious’ or a ‘popular’ book. Some critics have called it Dickensian, and the article used that claim to explore if that makes it serious literature. I found it interesting, because Dickens was a popular writer in his own time, and critics universally believed his novels to be sentimental, his characters stereotypical. And yet, the same writer is being considered as a standard of high art a century and a half later.
Thankfully, there is a growing interest in studying literature in the internet age. I think it is very important, because these new forms are more ephemeral than ever, and we could easily bury something worthwhile in the lost corners of the interweb.

That has happened a lot in pop music history, hasn’t it? Some are instantly relevant, like Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell. Others have had it grow in time, most notably The Beatles, who were ‘popular’ one minute, and part of the world’s history the next!

A writer is someone who chooses to write. There are bad writers. There are good writers. But I think writing is something that can be done without thanks, or praise, or acknowledgement. We just have to do it.